Significance/occupied territories & Jewish settler movement.

The significance of teh occupied territories to Israel differs from group to group in Israeli society. From the conquest of the occupied territories by Israel during the Six Day War, small numbers of Israeli settlements began to appear. The settler-movement began for many reasons. The first is that are that the territories, especially those of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, are a part of 'Biblical Israel', allegedly granted to the Israelites by god as their Holy Land (a significant proportion of the Israeli population are termed by historian Thomas Friedman to be Religious Zionists, who feel that the Messiah will come once the Jewish people have earned the Holy Land back). The second is the sheer lack of land inside of the accepted

The superpowers (the United States and Soviet Union) have no interest in annexing any occupied territories for themselves. The United States' interests in the occupied territories pertained to economic factors, such as the Suez canal, and the ability to broker 'land for peace' deals so as to help secure the American Jewish lobby's support (the lobby controlling key industries and the American Jews being of so great a size, and having such committed voting practices). The USSR on the other hand, aside from wishing to maintain the Suez Canal, had few true objectives in the Middle East than just destabilising it for the United States. This was observed in the supply of false intelligence by the Soviets to Egypt in order to have them attack Israel on Yom Kippur, 1973. Hence, the superpowers' interests in the occupied territories are limited, not non-existent.

borders of Israel. The third cause of the settler-movement is mass Jewish migration to Israel from the late 1980s onwards as a consequence of the Israeli air-drops in Ethopia, in which the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) conducted missions to that country in order to air-transport Ethopian Jews to Israel (under the 1950 Law of Return anybody who can prove their Jewish descendence to the Israeli government is automatically granted Israeli citizenship), and the 800,000 Soviet Jews who migrated to Israel with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the freedom of movement from the former Soviet states. These new Israelis require a place to settle in Israel, and cheap housing is not in short supply if one is willing to live in the West Bank. To Israeli-government economists, the occupied territories represent gains in trade, such as the 1967 advance right up to the bank of the Suez Canal. To Israeli Labour peacemakers like Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, the occupied ter

Some topics in this essay:
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